The New York Times Looks Closer at Bloomberg View

Bloomberg View, the op-ed venture from Michael Bloomberg, got a close examination in the New York Times yesterday, and we might as well get the staggering stat out of the way now: Bloomberg is paying each of its top editors – David Shipley and James P. Rubin – about $500,000 a year.

Okay, deep breaths everyone. All set? Moving on…

The article discusses Bloomberg’s motives for creating the project, and casts a shadow of doubt on our theory that he was using Bloomberg View to strengthen an eventual run at the presidency:

The mayor, a keen student of power, is privately conceding to friends that he will not be a candidate for president, a position he covets, and he is coming to grips with the reality that philanthropy, even on the sky-is-the-limit scale that he is planning, will not be enough to make him a potent force in national and international affairs.

So Mr. Bloomberg, 69, is trying on yet another new suit, that of policy-shaping publisher.

Of course, the problem there is that no one has ever regarded any of Bloomberg LP’s units as having a great influence on anything aside from stocks and number crunching. That too, appears to be motivation for Bloomberg:

When he learned that Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, had a low opinion of BusinessWeek in the past, the mayor asked, ‘What do I have to do to make you read it?’

Bloomberg has a tough road ahead to gain traction in the op-ed world, but as always, his deep pockets will surely help. The reported budget for Bloomberg View is about $5 million.